Shaving for a cause

MASON CITY, Iowa – A 30-year-old beard has met its match, as Father Ken Gehling shaved his scruff for a good cause.

Father Gehling is the Mercy Medical Center North Iowa chaplain and he used his role at the hospital to spark up a food drive challenge.

He told the nursing staff that if they collected more than 750 pounds of food for the Hawkeye Harvest Food Bank, that he would shave his decades old beard.

They succeeded and collected more than 800 pounds of food and Gehling says he was more than happy to follow through on his promise.

“I just feel very happy that we got all that food that’s the important thing,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to be eating, and because I like to eat, that’s an important thing to have.”

During the shave, Gehling was trying to recruit other men into starting up their own food bank challenge.

He says that because his beard grows so fast, he is seriously thinking about growing it out and doing it all again next year.